I liked 3DTV and am super disappointed that its no longer available at all.. My 3DTV recently died and unless I want to buy a used model (or luck out and find a warehouse with a really old one still in stock,) I'm SOL. And 3DTV wasn't really all that expensive.. at least not at its peak. It was maybe an extra 5-10% over an equivalent non-3D model and 3D blurays were similarly a bit higher price but hardly breaking the bank.
VR on the other hand.. the HTC Vive is more expensive than many consumer grade PCs. Its almost comparable to the price of an enthusiast machine. That's like 100%+ cost. The PS VR system is certainly much cheaper than HTC, but its still more expensive than the PS4 you're plugging it into.
Oculus is somewhere in the middle, but they're kind of hampered by their Facebook ownership. Geeks and nerds have a hate-on for FB and Zuckerberg in particular (whether deserved or not,) and VR isn't yet mainstream enough for your average FB user to even care about, never mind shelling out hundreds of dollars for. Then throw in all of the lawsuit bullshit with Zenimax which would somewhat sour corporate interest and yeah.. not super surprising that Oculus in particular isn't taking off.
On the other hand though.. perhaps that also makes them not the best measure of the state of VR in general since their problems are more due to perception of the people involved rather than perception of the tech itself. Of course bad perception can still kill a good product so hopefully Sony, Valve or even HTC will step up and make themselves the new face of VR until Oculus gets their mojo back.
not to mention the decline of civilization, the collapse of morality and the ruination of all we hold dear.
Really? The ruination of all we hold dear? I didn't realize the whole of modern society was relying on me making it to a Thursday night party. Guess I better brush up on my beer pong!
Other than that, this seems like "No duh, but with internet!" Time and energy are scarce resources for most people, and we're not all taught how to manage them properly. Energy especially. You can find time management courses if you feel you need them but I've never heard of a course that teaches you how to manage your life such that the party you get invited to on Monday when you're well rested after the weekend still seems like a good idea when Friday night rolls around and you're exhausted. Never mind if you have a family and every excursion requires either hiring a babysitter or having to choose whether you or your spouse gets to go out tonight or whatever other dynamic you have to deal with.
Generally you wouldn't be carpooling with your next door neighbor. Typically, at least in concept, you'd be carpooling with a coworker or someone from a nearby business who lives in the same general direction as you even if they're a couple miles away. Or better yet, many such someones.
The idea being that the time spent running around picking up all those people is comparable to or lower than the amount of time spent idling in traffic on the "high"way, and of course for the last person on the pickup route, it will be significantly faster. Similarly, while that one car may be using more fuel to do all the running around, at the same time its saving an entire additional car's worth of fuel (or possibly 2+ cars' worth) if you have multiple passengers in your carpool.
It seems that most people (or at least most Western people at least -- can't speak for other parts of the world) tend to put themselves in the mind of the driver who has to put in extra time and fuel and think its a horrible idea -- they rarely seem to consider the viewpoint of the passengers. And of course in a well-conceived carpool, the driver would rotate so that its not always a single person getting the shaft and everyone gets equal share of the beneficial days (which again, improve with larger carpools as the "driving" days would be divided even further.)
Or alternatively if all of the carpool members are within a few blocks of a straight shot, the furthest out guy could stop and make pickups with only a minor inconvenience to himself, potentially well made up for by being able to use the HOV lanes and such, even though he's always the driver.
Now if you work in an office with like 3 people who are all on different ends of the city, and you don't like talking to anyone outside your office.. well sure, carpooling probably isn't going to work for you. But even if that's a large majority of the population there's always things local authorities can do (whether governmental or NGO) such as setting up carpool groups where you can find other folk in your area that you otherwise wouldn't have met and so forth.
Of course I don't know Jakarta's conditions specifically or why drivers decided that drugging children was a better approach than looking for people to legitimately carpool with, but we can't really take one city's problems as a guide for the rest of the world without some deep thought into the problems they're facing compared to the problems elsewhere.
I'm suspect you're joking, but in case anyone takes you seriously.. this is quite different from Helium. This is a single heavy nucleon with a +2 charge, whereas Helium is 4 (or occasionally 3) individual light nucleons, two of which hold a +1 charge each (and the remaining 1-2 are neutral of course.)
The reason electrons carry charge is because they can move through a conductive material
Uhh no. Electrons carry charge intrinsically. Moving through a conductive material is not necessary (though a moving charge -- whether from an electron or any other charged particle -- gives rise to magnetic forces. Which is not the same as the intrinsic magnetic moment that an electron also has due to its spin, though the two types of magnetism being named similarly is definitely not coincidence either.) Check out this Veritasium video, and the related minutephysics video he links to, for a bit of a graphical overview.
this particle will only ever carry electric charge in a plasma
I suppose that's technically true, but
in materials baryons have enormously higher masses and are subject to the strong nuclear force
this is not why, or at least not the immediate issue. We need to figure out a way to keep these kind of particles around long enough for the plasma to cool to a point where electron capture is possible before we can say conclusively that it doesn't happen. Doing some Googling, I don't even really see much discussion of the question so its likely not something people have bothered thinking about too much given that its currently not really a plausible thing to attempt.
That said, I'm sure someone somewhere has attempted to do the math and I don't know what they may have concluded, so I can't necessarily say you're wrong about the impossibility of electron capture should we ever manage to keep an exotic baryon around long enough to find out.
If you are taking a mp3 (which has already lost fidelity by its nature)...and rip that to another mp3 copy...you lose more...do it again...you lose more quality.
Yes, but the solution there is "don't do that." If its already in mp3 format, then why would you bother reencoding it back to mp3? Just copy it as it is.
SO...it depends if the whole copy workflow is lossless vs lossy.
Only for the original encoding. After that, there's little reason to reencode unless you absolutely have to format shift for some reason, but that's rare these days. Audio has settled into a small handful of formats that are all generally recognized by modern players, and the ones that don't usually have plugins available to fill the gap.
Please report to the Thought Police to pay your fine and purchase your non-exclusive performance rights to the song. That will be $15,000 per "performance," payable immediately and retroactive to your great grandparents' time.
Music is somewhat different to movies. Most of the time, movies can only be watched once or twice and then they're boring. Maybe a few really good ones you'll go back and rewatch once every year or three but on average, they're use-and-forget.
Music on the other hand can be played over and over again and generally doesn't get boring. It can also be played equally well in the background (or sometimes better) while doing something else rather than having to fully focus on it as you usually do with a movie.
You can easily have a 10 or 20 day long music collection, throw it on shuffle, and just listen to everything a bit at a time and eventually you'll have heard the entire library. You can't really do that with movies.
I mean certainly most libraries that large will have some things that nobody listens to -- you downloaded (legitimately or otherwise) an entire album but only like one or two songs.. or somebody sent you a song you didn't really enjoy but never got around to deleting.. or songs you used to like but have since gotten sick of, or songs that only suit you in a rare mood, etc.
But generally speaking its not going to be the the same scenario as movies where you simply can't watch them as fast as you can download them. I'm sure someone somewhere tracks the new release listings and blindly downloads every album that comes out just for the sake of doing so, but that's not the majority.
The fun thing about digital is that it doesn't degrade when you copy it -- as long as the source stream is good quality, the rip will be equally good. And there are a lot of streams that offer good-to-high quality audio providing you have sufficient bandwidth to handle it.
But generally speaking, no most people don't care much about quality. Obviously if given an equal choice between the two, almost everyone would choose the higher quality. But if its a choice between a low quality and not having the song/movie/other work at all.. well the low quality starts seeming pretty good in that scenario.
Maybe not, but it will set them back a decade as they won't be able to use the patented ideas in the interim for commercial testing or anything like that -- basically nothing outside of their away-from-prying-eyes labs.
So I take it you don't drive on the interstate? Or out of your own driveway for that matter? Or call the cops if you get robbed? And I'm assuming you are or are planning to send your kids to private schools, and will just leave them uneducated if you can't afford to do so when the time comes? I mean if they can't succeed its their own fault right? Got nothing to do with the fact that their parents left them uneducated purely because of stubborn adherence to a specific economic theory.
You _do_ pay for these things. Its called taxes. Yes, that means people who don't use a service have to pay for it anyway, and that people who are too broke to pay for it still get usage of it.. but for the majority of the population, they're "entitled" to it because they absolutely _are_ paying for it. What do you think your taxes are used for? The government doesn't just take your money and sit on it, and even in the US, the military is only about 1/5 of government expenses. Almost all of the remainder goes back to the people in one form or another.
There's one big difference though: The grid has a fairly substantial (relatively) fixed cost that you don't have -- they've got to maintain thousands of miles of cables and poles and transformers and other equipment. Their responsibility doesn't stop at the power plant's land border like your home system does.
So getting cheaper power generation only goes so far, even with their scaling potential, because those fixes costs are well.. fixed.. and have to be amortized across all of the kWh they sell. As each kWh gets cheaper (and assuming non-increasing usage,) the percentage of cost per kWh that goes to cover fixed costs increases relative to the percentage that covers generation costs.
As the per-kWh percentage approaches zero, it becomes harder for the grid to compete with smaller installations that don't have such high fixed costs to deal with -- whether individual home installations or community microgrids or whatever.
But the grid has advantages that we'll lose as well, such as redundancy and the ability to bear sudden large spikes (or drops) without serious issue. Here's a rather humorous video on the topic. The smaller you go, the harder it is to deal with things like that (though presumably, such events would also be less common and a smaller spike when they do happen.)
just to get away from the regular hours-long "squirrel on transformer" events
my system has only ever gone down when I took it down to upgrade it
OK, but the real question is how long will it take you to fix when it does go wrong? Do you have spares of all of the parts? Or a source nearby to obtain them? Or would you have to wait possibly days or weeks while they're shipped from somewhere?
Of course best of both worlds is to have your own and backup from the grid to cover times when yours fails for whatever reason..
Participation by a few is not the same as consent of the many. And looking the other way is a pretty good plan when the alternative is having your eyes burned out or something equally cruel.
The only way to stop a dictator is for a large portion of the population to simultaneously decide to say "fuck it" and risk their lives to overthrow the government. And that's not even easy in all cases. Consider DRNK.. the general population would be armed with shovels and rakes if they're lucky. The army is armed with assault rifles. How many thousands of farmers do you think would die trying to take down a single battalion of Kim Jong-Un's guard?
So your only real option is to convince the army itself to defect. But they're given all sorts of privileges purely for that reason, and anyone who even suggests improving the lives of the general populace is punished harshly (if not outright killed,) leaving behind an army that's very dedicated to maintaining the status quo.
Of course, that's kind of a worst case scenario. There are plenty of countries where the governmental control was never firmly established and rebel groups are capable of arming themselves to the extent of being able to fight back.. and then you end up with a years or decades long civil war and solar vs grid power is the least of anyone's concern.
What magical country do you live in where elected officials stop being influenced by money after the election is over? Its certainly not the US.. or Canada.. or pretty much any other democracy that I know of. It really doesn't matter who wins or what hoops bribers have to go through to have their funding not be called "bribes," money always has and always will influence politics, even in a democracy.
That's exactly the kind of scenario these people are complaining about. The national grid is huge, complex, and expensive to maintain. That last part is the critical issue. Maintenance costs are relatively fixed for a certain grid size, and the grid size is relatively fixed by geography. Which means as people leave the grid, there's less and less income to cover the relatively fixed maintenance costs and eventually that will become a pretty serious problem. The grid operators will then be stuck with essentially cutting off areas that aren't profitable enough, and you'll end up in a situation where yeah you have your local microgrid.. but without the backup that you're wanting.
And then add to that the fact that power generation typically scales very well -- that is, 1000 people individually installing 3 solar panels each will be less efficient than a 3000 panel centralized farm that those 1000 people all draw from. So while it might make economic sense for some individuals to break away from the grid, in aggregate its going to be worse for the economy as a whole, leading to a bit of a tragedy of the commons scenario (though not nearly as tragic as some!
Inefficiency of the commons?)
But regardless, I'm not quite up for panicking about it yet. A rant by the incumbents about maybe losing some profit a decade from now should probably be taken with a few grains of salt.
You say that as a joke, but MS really doesn't mind that much.
Of course they'd prefer if you pay, but if you refuse to do that then their 2nd choice is that you pirate their software rather than using somebody else'. If they're not getting money from you either way, then they may as well at least get the vendor lock-in and other such intangible benefits.
And these days especially, they would MUCH rather you use a free (whether pirated or given) version of Win10 than previous versions of Windows. Again, they aren't getting money either way so the intangible benefits are more critical. Particularly the fact that they can issue security patches and try to reign in some of the bad press they always get that isn't really their fault. Of course they also (rightfully) get plenty of bad press for things that are their fault, but its pretty hard to blame them for getting hacked if you're using a 15 year old OS (and they're apparently still able and willing to issue patches for XP when things get really really bad as we've see over the past few weeks.)
MS was only giving it away to existing Win7 and Win8 customers. The recent spat of malware that's been going around has been so horrible that MS has even had to issue patches for XP, suggesting that XP is still highly used and a round of cheap/free offers for all people (not just 7/8 users) would probably still be a significant benefit.
Of course, there's the issue of whether Win10 will run with anything approaching useful functionality on an XP-era PC. I'm sure there's a percentage of people who have stuck with XP just because they're stubborn, but the general masses typically work with whatever OS is installed when they get their PC, so if there's still a significant amount of XP out there, you can expect a significant amount of XP-era machines running it.
Probably small differences, but remember that the EM force is mediated by light, so even underground the electrons are constantly absorbing and firing off photons among themselves.
That said, yes the enormous amount of photons being shot at us from the sun almost certainly means that an electron on the surface is going to be hit more often than one underground. I'm not entirely sure how much more often (ie: I don't know the natural rate of emission and absorption between electrons just sitting in a lump underground) but it will be a higher rate nonetheless.
Which brings us to the way we usually report numbers like that -- averaging. Photon emission and absorption are pretty random events at the best of times, never mind when you consider say a photon in the middle of a laser beam will be getting hit many, many more times than one floating around in space. But you average the two rates together (and as many other samples as you can measure) and then you can talk about an amount in a sensible manner that doesn't require going into a detailed description of a specific testing environment.
While I agree its weird, it probably benefits us as much or possibly more than it benefits them. Canada certainly isn't irrelevant on the world stage, but nor are we exactly a superpower that would be any sort of a threat to China. So Canada would have limited usefulness as a target to be hacked.
On the other hand, while we may ourselves not have much reason to hack China (again, what would we do with the information we gleaned? Threaten them?) But we have a neighbor we're pretty friendly with who would be much more interested in knowing what China's up to, and they may well want to ask us to appropriate information as proxy for them.
Of course that said, the spy game is pretty prevalent anyway. Generally not James Bond-style action spies, but every government is happy to learn what the other governments are doing in hopes of finding even a tiny bit of leverage for the next time they have to negotiate something.
Almost by definition, us "nobodies" aren't worth hacking. We're not talking about botnets and ransomware here. We're talking about dedicated efforts to steal or damage critical (or at least very valuable) information.
In this case, there's absolutely no reason to "put people first." Why would they go to the trouble of international negotiations to stop hacking against targets that wouldn't be getting hacked anyway? Or at least not hacked in the way that this agreement would be attempting to prevent.
Slashdot Mirror
I liked 3DTV and am super disappointed that its no longer available at all.. My 3DTV recently died and unless I want to buy a used model (or luck out and find a warehouse with a really old one still in stock,) I'm SOL. And 3DTV wasn't really all that expensive.. at least not at its peak. It was maybe an extra 5-10% over an equivalent non-3D model and 3D blurays were similarly a bit higher price but hardly breaking the bank.
VR on the other hand.. the HTC Vive is more expensive than many consumer grade PCs. Its almost comparable to the price of an enthusiast machine. That's like 100%+ cost. The PS VR system is certainly much cheaper than HTC, but its still more expensive than the PS4 you're plugging it into.
Oculus is somewhere in the middle, but they're kind of hampered by their Facebook ownership. Geeks and nerds have a hate-on for FB and Zuckerberg in particular (whether deserved or not,) and VR isn't yet mainstream enough for your average FB user to even care about, never mind shelling out hundreds of dollars for. Then throw in all of the lawsuit bullshit with Zenimax which would somewhat sour corporate interest and yeah.. not super surprising that Oculus in particular isn't taking off.
On the other hand though.. perhaps that also makes them not the best measure of the state of VR in general since their problems are more due to perception of the people involved rather than perception of the tech itself. Of course bad perception can still kill a good product so hopefully Sony, Valve or even HTC will step up and make themselves the new face of VR until Oculus gets their mojo back.
I think the hyperbole is strong with this one..
not to mention the decline of civilization, the collapse of morality and the ruination of all we hold dear.
Really? The ruination of all we hold dear? I didn't realize the whole of modern society was relying on me making it to a Thursday night party. Guess I better brush up on my beer pong!
Other than that, this seems like "No duh, but with internet!" Time and energy are scarce resources for most people, and we're not all taught how to manage them properly. Energy especially. You can find time management courses if you feel you need them but I've never heard of a course that teaches you how to manage your life such that the party you get invited to on Monday when you're well rested after the weekend still seems like a good idea when Friday night rolls around and you're exhausted. Never mind if you have a family and every excursion requires either hiring a babysitter or having to choose whether you or your spouse gets to go out tonight or whatever other dynamic you have to deal with.
Generally you wouldn't be carpooling with your next door neighbor. Typically, at least in concept, you'd be carpooling with a coworker or someone from a nearby business who lives in the same general direction as you even if they're a couple miles away. Or better yet, many such someones.
The idea being that the time spent running around picking up all those people is comparable to or lower than the amount of time spent idling in traffic on the "high"way, and of course for the last person on the pickup route, it will be significantly faster. Similarly, while that one car may be using more fuel to do all the running around, at the same time its saving an entire additional car's worth of fuel (or possibly 2+ cars' worth) if you have multiple passengers in your carpool.
It seems that most people (or at least most Western people at least -- can't speak for other parts of the world) tend to put themselves in the mind of the driver who has to put in extra time and fuel and think its a horrible idea -- they rarely seem to consider the viewpoint of the passengers. And of course in a well-conceived carpool, the driver would rotate so that its not always a single person getting the shaft and everyone gets equal share of the beneficial days (which again, improve with larger carpools as the "driving" days would be divided even further.)
Or alternatively if all of the carpool members are within a few blocks of a straight shot, the furthest out guy could stop and make pickups with only a minor inconvenience to himself, potentially well made up for by being able to use the HOV lanes and such, even though he's always the driver.
Now if you work in an office with like 3 people who are all on different ends of the city, and you don't like talking to anyone outside your office.. well sure, carpooling probably isn't going to work for you. But even if that's a large majority of the population there's always things local authorities can do (whether governmental or NGO) such as setting up carpool groups where you can find other folk in your area that you otherwise wouldn't have met and so forth.
Of course I don't know Jakarta's conditions specifically or why drivers decided that drugging children was a better approach than looking for people to legitimately carpool with, but we can't really take one city's problems as a guide for the rest of the world without some deep thought into the problems they're facing compared to the problems elsewhere.
I'm suspect you're joking, but in case anyone takes you seriously.. this is quite different from Helium. This is a single heavy nucleon with a +2 charge, whereas Helium is 4 (or occasionally 3) individual light nucleons, two of which hold a +1 charge each (and the remaining 1-2 are neutral of course.)
The reason electrons carry charge is because they can move through a conductive material
Uhh no. Electrons carry charge intrinsically. Moving through a conductive material is not necessary (though a moving charge -- whether from an electron or any other charged particle -- gives rise to magnetic forces. Which is not the same as the intrinsic magnetic moment that an electron also has due to its spin, though the two types of magnetism being named similarly is definitely not coincidence either.) Check out this Veritasium video, and the related minutephysics video he links to, for a bit of a graphical overview.
this particle will only ever carry electric charge in a plasma
I suppose that's technically true, but
in materials baryons have enormously higher masses and are subject to the strong nuclear force
this is not why, or at least not the immediate issue. We need to figure out a way to keep these kind of particles around long enough for the plasma to cool to a point where electron capture is possible before we can say conclusively that it doesn't happen. Doing some Googling, I don't even really see much discussion of the question so its likely not something people have bothered thinking about too much given that its currently not really a plausible thing to attempt.
That said, I'm sure someone somewhere has attempted to do the math and I don't know what they may have concluded, so I can't necessarily say you're wrong about the impossibility of electron capture should we ever manage to keep an exotic baryon around long enough to find out.
Nope. Once its digital, the bits don't change.
I suppose to clarify, that should really be "once its encoded," whether lossless or not.
ONLY if you are copying it in a lossless format.
Nope. Once its digital, the bits don't change.
If you are taking a mp3 (which has already lost fidelity by its nature)...and rip that to another mp3 copy...you lose more...do it again...you lose more quality.
Yes, but the solution there is "don't do that." If its already in mp3 format, then why would you bother reencoding it back to mp3? Just copy it as it is.
SO...it depends if the whole copy workflow is lossless vs lossy.
Only for the original encoding. After that, there's little reason to reencode unless you absolutely have to format shift for some reason, but that's rare these days. Audio has settled into a small handful of formats that are all generally recognized by modern players, and the ones that don't usually have plugins available to fill the gap.
I guess you haven't been paying attention. "On the internet!" makes everything completely different when it comes to IP.
Please report to the Thought Police to pay your fine and purchase your non-exclusive performance rights to the song. That will be $15,000 per "performance," payable immediately and retroactive to your great grandparents' time.
A closed-source app distributed via torrent link from a sketchy website.
Music is somewhat different to movies. Most of the time, movies can only be watched once or twice and then they're boring. Maybe a few really good ones you'll go back and rewatch once every year or three but on average, they're use-and-forget.
Music on the other hand can be played over and over again and generally doesn't get boring. It can also be played equally well in the background (or sometimes better) while doing something else rather than having to fully focus on it as you usually do with a movie.
You can easily have a 10 or 20 day long music collection, throw it on shuffle, and just listen to everything a bit at a time and eventually you'll have heard the entire library. You can't really do that with movies.
I mean certainly most libraries that large will have some things that nobody listens to -- you downloaded (legitimately or otherwise) an entire album but only like one or two songs.. or somebody sent you a song you didn't really enjoy but never got around to deleting.. or songs you used to like but have since gotten sick of, or songs that only suit you in a rare mood, etc.
But generally speaking its not going to be the the same scenario as movies where you simply can't watch them as fast as you can download them. I'm sure someone somewhere tracks the new release listings and blindly downloads every album that comes out just for the sake of doing so, but that's not the majority.
The fun thing about digital is that it doesn't degrade when you copy it -- as long as the source stream is good quality, the rip will be equally good. And there are a lot of streams that offer good-to-high quality audio providing you have sufficient bandwidth to handle it.
But generally speaking, no most people don't care much about quality. Obviously if given an equal choice between the two, almost everyone would choose the higher quality. But if its a choice between a low quality and not having the song/movie/other work at all.. well the low quality starts seeming pretty good in that scenario.
Maybe not, but it will set them back a decade as they won't be able to use the patented ideas in the interim for commercial testing or anything like that -- basically nothing outside of their away-from-prying-eyes labs.
So I take it you don't drive on the interstate? Or out of your own driveway for that matter? Or call the cops if you get robbed? And I'm assuming you are or are planning to send your kids to private schools, and will just leave them uneducated if you can't afford to do so when the time comes? I mean if they can't succeed its their own fault right? Got nothing to do with the fact that their parents left them uneducated purely because of stubborn adherence to a specific economic theory.
You _do_ pay for these things. Its called taxes. Yes, that means people who don't use a service have to pay for it anyway, and that people who are too broke to pay for it still get usage of it.. but for the majority of the population, they're "entitled" to it because they absolutely _are_ paying for it. What do you think your taxes are used for? The government doesn't just take your money and sit on it, and even in the US, the military is only about 1/5 of government expenses. Almost all of the remainder goes back to the people in one form or another.
There's one big difference though: The grid has a fairly substantial (relatively) fixed cost that you don't have -- they've got to maintain thousands of miles of cables and poles and transformers and other equipment. Their responsibility doesn't stop at the power plant's land border like your home system does.
So getting cheaper power generation only goes so far, even with their scaling potential, because those fixes costs are well.. fixed.. and have to be amortized across all of the kWh they sell. As each kWh gets cheaper (and assuming non-increasing usage,) the percentage of cost per kWh that goes to cover fixed costs increases relative to the percentage that covers generation costs.
As the per-kWh percentage approaches zero, it becomes harder for the grid to compete with smaller installations that don't have such high fixed costs to deal with -- whether individual home installations or community microgrids or whatever.
But the grid has advantages that we'll lose as well, such as redundancy and the ability to bear sudden large spikes (or drops) without serious issue. Here's a rather humorous video on the topic. The smaller you go, the harder it is to deal with things like that (though presumably, such events would also be less common and a smaller spike when they do happen.)
just to get away from the regular hours-long "squirrel on transformer" events
my system has only ever gone down when I took it down to upgrade it
OK, but the real question is how long will it take you to fix when it does go wrong? Do you have spares of all of the parts? Or a source nearby to obtain them? Or would you have to wait possibly days or weeks while they're shipped from somewhere?
Of course best of both worlds is to have your own and backup from the grid to cover times when yours fails for whatever reason..
Participation by a few is not the same as consent of the many. And looking the other way is a pretty good plan when the alternative is having your eyes burned out or something equally cruel.
The only way to stop a dictator is for a large portion of the population to simultaneously decide to say "fuck it" and risk their lives to overthrow the government. And that's not even easy in all cases. Consider DRNK.. the general population would be armed with shovels and rakes if they're lucky. The army is armed with assault rifles. How many thousands of farmers do you think would die trying to take down a single battalion of Kim Jong-Un's guard?
So your only real option is to convince the army itself to defect. But they're given all sorts of privileges purely for that reason, and anyone who even suggests improving the lives of the general populace is punished harshly (if not outright killed,) leaving behind an army that's very dedicated to maintaining the status quo.
Of course, that's kind of a worst case scenario. There are plenty of countries where the governmental control was never firmly established and rebel groups are capable of arming themselves to the extent of being able to fight back.. and then you end up with a years or decades long civil war and solar vs grid power is the least of anyone's concern.
What magical country do you live in where elected officials stop being influenced by money after the election is over? Its certainly not the US.. or Canada.. or pretty much any other democracy that I know of. It really doesn't matter who wins or what hoops bribers have to go through to have their funding not be called "bribes," money always has and always will influence politics, even in a democracy.
That's exactly the kind of scenario these people are complaining about. The national grid is huge, complex, and expensive to maintain. That last part is the critical issue. Maintenance costs are relatively fixed for a certain grid size, and the grid size is relatively fixed by geography. Which means as people leave the grid, there's less and less income to cover the relatively fixed maintenance costs and eventually that will become a pretty serious problem. The grid operators will then be stuck with essentially cutting off areas that aren't profitable enough, and you'll end up in a situation where yeah you have your local microgrid.. but without the backup that you're wanting.
And then add to that the fact that power generation typically scales very well -- that is, 1000 people individually installing 3 solar panels each will be less efficient than a 3000 panel centralized farm that those 1000 people all draw from. So while it might make economic sense for some individuals to break away from the grid, in aggregate its going to be worse for the economy as a whole, leading to a bit of a tragedy of the commons scenario (though not nearly as tragic as some!
Inefficiency of the commons?)
But regardless, I'm not quite up for panicking about it yet. A rant by the incumbents about maybe losing some profit a decade from now should probably be taken with a few grains of salt.
You say that as a joke, but MS really doesn't mind that much.
Of course they'd prefer if you pay, but if you refuse to do that then their 2nd choice is that you pirate their software rather than using somebody else'. If they're not getting money from you either way, then they may as well at least get the vendor lock-in and other such intangible benefits.
And these days especially, they would MUCH rather you use a free (whether pirated or given) version of Win10 than previous versions of Windows. Again, they aren't getting money either way so the intangible benefits are more critical. Particularly the fact that they can issue security patches and try to reign in some of the bad press they always get that isn't really their fault. Of course they also (rightfully) get plenty of bad press for things that are their fault, but its pretty hard to blame them for getting hacked if you're using a 15 year old OS (and they're apparently still able and willing to issue patches for XP when things get really really bad as we've see over the past few weeks.)
Probably because even in India, "they" encompasses lots of people who have computing needs beyond "ERMGFOSSBBQ."
MS was only giving it away to existing Win7 and Win8 customers. The recent spat of malware that's been going around has been so horrible that MS has even had to issue patches for XP, suggesting that XP is still highly used and a round of cheap/free offers for all people (not just 7/8 users) would probably still be a significant benefit.
Of course, there's the issue of whether Win10 will run with anything approaching useful functionality on an XP-era PC. I'm sure there's a percentage of people who have stuck with XP just because they're stubborn, but the general masses typically work with whatever OS is installed when they get their PC, so if there's still a significant amount of XP out there, you can expect a significant amount of XP-era machines running it.
Probably small differences, but remember that the EM force is mediated by light, so even underground the electrons are constantly absorbing and firing off photons among themselves.
That said, yes the enormous amount of photons being shot at us from the sun almost certainly means that an electron on the surface is going to be hit more often than one underground. I'm not entirely sure how much more often (ie: I don't know the natural rate of emission and absorption between electrons just sitting in a lump underground) but it will be a higher rate nonetheless.
Which brings us to the way we usually report numbers like that -- averaging. Photon emission and absorption are pretty random events at the best of times, never mind when you consider say a photon in the middle of a laser beam will be getting hit many, many more times than one floating around in space. But you average the two rates together (and as many other samples as you can measure) and then you can talk about an amount in a sensible manner that doesn't require going into a detailed description of a specific testing environment.
While I agree its weird, it probably benefits us as much or possibly more than it benefits them. Canada certainly isn't irrelevant on the world stage, but nor are we exactly a superpower that would be any sort of a threat to China. So Canada would have limited usefulness as a target to be hacked.
On the other hand, while we may ourselves not have much reason to hack China (again, what would we do with the information we gleaned? Threaten them?) But we have a neighbor we're pretty friendly with who would be much more interested in knowing what China's up to, and they may well want to ask us to appropriate information as proxy for them.
Of course that said, the spy game is pretty prevalent anyway. Generally not James Bond-style action spies, but every government is happy to learn what the other governments are doing in hopes of finding even a tiny bit of leverage for the next time they have to negotiate something.
Almost by definition, us "nobodies" aren't worth hacking. We're not talking about botnets and ransomware here. We're talking about dedicated efforts to steal or damage critical (or at least very valuable) information.
In this case, there's absolutely no reason to "put people first." Why would they go to the trouble of international negotiations to stop hacking against targets that wouldn't be getting hacked anyway? Or at least not hacked in the way that this agreement would be attempting to prevent.